Abstract

"Habitat" is often used ambiguously in conservation biology and ecology to mean either the specific biotic and abiotic parts of the environment where an organism lives (e.g., the habitat of species x), or to describe a particular environment without reference to a specific species (e.g., the coastal dune habitat). Conservation legislation usually defines habitat as a function of the species, as do botanists, while zoologists are more likely to use habitat to mean a particular environment. We argue that this ambiguity can cause confusion in applied conservation and support defining habitat as "the environment of a species, and particularly those features that determine where the species occurs".